Microwave Expander
The Microwave Expander (also know as just Expander) is a new weapon presented in the Plutonium Pack expansion pack. It is a extension of the Shrinker weapon and uses a secondary slot in the keyboard. Is is found for the first time in the first level of The Birth episode, It's Impossible. Description The Expander may not be picked by itself, but, otherwise, picking a Shrinker and use an antenna reflector ammo to attach the weapon and extend it's power changing the crystal color to a red'ish tone. The Expander's attack function is the opposite of the Shrink Ray. Instead of shooting green projectiles it emits small glowing sparks that instantly hit any foe caught in it. Once an enemy is at the brink of death they'll grow and expand almost double their size and eventually explode into a shower of blood and gore damaging any unlucky enemy or player standing near it. While the Shrinker is better used against strong foes, the Expander may be exponentially more devastating in weaker ones. The Expander is the most powerful hitscan weapon of the game. It has the highest damage and complete accurate auto-aim (being the highest menace in a Deathmatch combat). And it's side-effect increase even more it's thread. Despite that, the weapon has a very limited maximum amount of ammo. Tips and Tricks *A great weapon to use against groups of enemies, especially weaker ones such as Assault Troopers or Captain's. *Considering the fact that it has a very low amount of ammo, and chewing it up fast, it would be wise to hurt enemies and lower their health a bit before using the Microwave Expander; you'll save a lot of ammo doing this. The same goes for the Freezethrower. Notes *The weapon name in text displayed when picking-up a Shrinker changed in the Atomic Edition from "SHRINKER" to "SHRINKER/EXPANDER" *There exist a full weapon sprite used in multiplayer game to display allied player's weapon. The sprite is close in look to the Shrinker pick-up. *It may be noted that the game wrongly already give the player a (empty) expander weapon without the need to picking-up an ammo containing the antenna reflector. *The Expander won't make a Mini Battlelord explode. Data Microwave Expander in other games *The Microwave Expander is not present at the Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown and Sega Saturn console ports since they removed the fourth episode. *In Duke Nukem 64, the Microwave Expander has a completely different graphic, as the Shrinker. It will look exact the same as the Shrinker except for the red crystal without any other increment such as an antenna reflector, and the ammo is a red crystal itself. The Expander may be picked around the levels as a full-weapon, in opposite to the original version. And the player can, subseqüently, pick-up a Expander and use a Shrinker crystal ammo to transform it in a Shrinker weapon. **A bug can be found which blue-like multiplayer defined Expander weapons are found in a blue-like color (because Build determine a weapon as multiplayer flag using palette 1, i.e. blue tone by default). This can be explained due to bad CON coding, as the sprite was originally used as the icon displayed over the player head to show his weapon in multiplayer, it has a different statnum that doesn't allow it to be deleted through normal ways. **The Expander does can cause the Mini Battlelord to grow in the console port.